2020 年 07 月大学英语四级考试真题（第 1 套）

Questions __26__ to __35__ are based on the following passage.

"Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated." Those were the words uttered by pioneering British scientist Rosalind Franklin, who firmly believed that the pursuit of science should be __26__ to all. As a woman working in the first half of the 20th century, Franklin's contributions to some of the greatest scientific discoveries of our time including the structure of DNA were sadly __27__ in her lifetime.

More than 60 years after Franklin's death, we are __28__ living in a different world, where women play an important part in every echelon (阶层) of our society—not least in science, innovation, higher education and research. UK universities are world leaders when it comes to advancing and __29__ gender equality. In the past decade, we have seen a __30__ increase in England in the number of women accepted on to full-time undergraduate degrees in science, technology, engineering and maths(Stem subjects). And in the last academic year, women __31__ for more than half of all Stem postgraduates at UK universities.

Data shows us the __32__ to success gets harder for women to climb the further up they go. Although women make up the majority of undergraduates in our universities, just under half of academic staff are female. At __33__ levels, only a quarter of professors are women, and black women make up less than 2% of all female academic staff.

There are also stark differences in pay across grades. The gender pay gap based on median salaries across the sector in 2016 - 2017 was 13.7%, __34__ there is still some way to go to ensure women are rising through the ranks to higher grade positions and being paid __35__.

The wallet is heading for extinction. As a day-to-day essential, it will die off with the generation who read print newspapers. The kind of shopping—where you hand over notes and count out change in return—now happens only in the most minor of our retail encounters, like buying a bar of chocolate or a pint of milk, from a corner shop. At the shops where you spend any real money, that money is increasingly abstracted. And this is more and more true, the higher up the scale you go. At the most cutting-edge retail stores—Victoria Beckham on Dover Street, for instance—you don't go and stand at any kind of cash register, when you decide to pay. The staff are equipped with iPads to take your payment while you relax on a sofa.

Which is nothing more or less than excellent service, if you have the money. But across society, the abstraction of the idea of cash makes me uneasy. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned. But earning money isn't quick or easy for most of us. Isn't it a bit weird that spending it should happen in half a blink (眨眼) of an eye ? Doesn't a wallet—that time-honoured Friday-night feeling of pleasing, promising fatness—represent something that matters ?

But I'll leave the economics to the experts. What bothers me about the death of the wallet is the change it represents in our physical environment. Everything about the look and feel of a wallet—the way the fastenings and materials wear and tear and loosen with age, the plastic and paper and gold and silver, and handwritten phone numbers and printed cinema tickets—is the very opposite of what our world is becoming. The opposite of a wallet is a smart phone or an iPad. The rounded edges, cool glass, smooth and unknowable as a pebble (鹅卵石). Instead of digging through pieces of paper and peering into corners, we move our fingers left and right. No more counting out coins. Show your wallet, if you still have one. It may not be here much longer.

It's late in the evening: time to close the book and turn off the computer. You're done for the day. What you may not realize, however, is that the learning process actually continues—in your dreams.

It might sound like science fiction, but researchers are increasingly focusing on the relationship between the knowledge and skills our brains absorb during the day and the fragmented, often bizarre imaginings they generate at night. Scientists have found that dreaming about a task we've learned is associated with improved performance in that activity (suggesting that there's some truth to the popular notion that we're "getting" a foreign language once we begin dreaming in it). What's more, researchers are coming to recognize that dreaming is an essential part of understanding, organizing and retaining what we learn.

While we sleep, research indicates, the brain replays the patterns of activity it experienced during waking hours, allowing us to enter what one psychologist calls a neural (神经的) virtual reality. A vivid example of such replay can be seen in a video researchers made recently about sleep disorders. They taught a series of dance moves to a group of patients with conditions like sleepwalking, in which the sleeper engages in the kind physical movement that does not normally occur during sleep. They then videotaped the subjects as they slept. Lying in bed, eyes closed, one female patient on the tape performs the dance moves she learned earlier.

This shows that while our bodies are at rest, our brains are drawing what's important from the information and events we've recently encountered, then integrating that data into the vast store of what we already know. In a 20l0 study, researchers at Harvard Medical School reported that college students who dreamed about a computer maze (迷宫) task they had learned showed a l0-fold improvement in their ability to find their way through the maze compared with participants who did not dream about the task.

Robert Stickgold, one of the Harvard researchers, suggests that studying right before bedtime or taking a nap following a study session in the afternoon might increase the odds of dreaming about the material. Think about that as your head hits the pillow tonight.